Filofax info

Filofaxes were developed by a British army officer who wanted to keep notes, maps and data well organised in a compact form. The heart of the Filofax is its six rings.

All Filofax pages are punched with six holes and pages are inserted into (and removed from) your Filofax as necessary. I am an advocate of organising one’s life through physical pages and your computer. I hate electronic organisers (or PDAs or my phone), although I understand that some people use them successfully.

However no one with an electronic organiser can find a phone number as quickly as I can with my trusty old Filofax. While they’re still turning it on, punching buttons, scrolling upwards and downwards, backwards and forwards . . . I have gone flip, flip, flip and bingo, there’s my number.

I still have the original Filofax organiser I bought in 1971, long before Filofaxes became a fashion accessory. Sadly Filofaxes are still considered trendy and people foolishly spend hundreds of dollars on Filofaxes bound in exotic leathers, while at Woolies you can buy cheap vinyl imitations for $8, and sometimes as low as $2. These are just as good.

At the front of my Filofax is a diary. I don’t buy any Filofax-brand paper inserts because they are outrageously expensive. A generic one from a stationery shop is $7. I write in my diary in pencil because my activities and appointments change often. I keep a pencil tied by 30cm of fishing line so I never need to search for a writing instrument.

In the address section, all the pages are printed from my computer. This needs no special program. I simply use my Microsoft Word program. If I ever lost my Filofax, I simply buy another one and re-create the pages safely stored in my computer.

How to make Filofax pages using only ordinary “Word”

Click one on “File”. Click one on “Page Setup”. Click on the “Paper Size” tab. Under “paper_size” select “Custom” and in “Width” type 9.4cm and in “Height” type 17.14cm. Click on the “Margins” tab. In “Top” type 0.63cm, “Bottom” 0.63cm, “Inside” 0.8cm, “Outside” 0.8cm, “Gutter” 1.0cm, “Header” 0.25cm and “Footer” 0.25cm. And un-tick “Mirror Margins”. This suits my Hewlett-Packard 4050 LaserJet printer, but you might have to play around with the settings under “Margins” to suit your printer. You probably need to handfeed in your small pages, one-by-one.